Word Processing

As we are less than a month away from the Big Write, it is a good time to review our options when it comes to word processing. I know many of us have Microsoft Word and Wordpad as standards, but there are better products out there, for all the right reasons. So I thought I'd share a few of them here for people who are getting ready for the Big Write. All of the ones I list below are FREE to download and use.

Open Office
I rarely use Microsoft Word these days, in favor of Open Office. Open Office is a suite of products that provide a text editor, spreadsheet program, and presentation program.
There are two things I like about Open Office.

First, it has a word predictor. The longer you use the program, the better the word prediction gets. This is great if you are typing complicated names or long words; the processory recognizes the name or word after the first few letters, and simple click of the enter/return key is enough to complete the word. Saves on keystrokes and stress.

Second, it has this amazing ability to remember where you left your cursor, even after you close the document and come back to it hours or days later. When you save and close your document, the cursor remains wherever you left it, whether that is in the middle, end, or beginning. This is great when working on a long document, because you don't have to remember where you left off on editing. And for any document that you are going to continue to add to, like your Nano-Novel, being able to open that document and begin typing immediately is a great bonus.

Open Office can be used on any operating system (Windows, Mac, Unix, Linux) and saves in every format imaginable, including MSWord and WordPerfect.

AbiWord
I've not used this one but have heard good things about it. It is a tiny program, only taking up a few bytes of space. It offers full functionality, works across multiple operating systems, and comes in almost every language you can think of (BONUS for our non-English-NanoWriters).

Jarte
This neat, tiny little app does things a word processor never thought of doing. Like tabbed browsing so you can easily get to each of the files that you have open. It takes up a very small amount of space and has the functionality of most of the big boys. The only downside is it only works with Windows operating system. Languages available include English and Dutch.

Writely
Want to work on your document anywhere, anytime, when you have a network connection? Writely works through your web browser (Internet Explorer or Firefox) and provides a secure way to keep documents. This product is owned by the fine people at Google and you will need a Gmail account. If you don't have Gmail, please feel free to drop me a comment, I'll get you hooked up!

Check back tomorrow for some writing helpers I've been collecting.